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Memories of UO at the bottom of the barrel

The Ducks ... No. 1? One former beat writer reflects on the hopeless Oregon program he once knew

By Bud Withers

The Seattle Times

Appeared in print: Thursday, Nov. 4, 2010, page C1

Pinch me, I’ve got to be dreaming. The football program I spent a good chunk of my professional life tagging after is No. 1 in the nation, respected throughout the land. Feared, even.

Did I just write that?

I’ve long since gotten used to Oregon getting good. Bit by bit, the Ducks began building toward it more than two decades ago. Then there was Kenny Wheaton, and the 1994 Rose Bowl team. Then Phil Knight, trucking millions down I-5 from Beaverton to Eugene.

That, I get. But this latest step, to the top of the college football polls, to the admiration and awe of just about every talking head nationally, is what’s so weird to process.

Understand, I come from a time of Oregon football when people’s minds around Eugene used to float in sort of a haze of unfounded hope and wistful fatalism. The fans would have died and gone to heaven just to see the Ducks ranked 24th or 25th. Oregon went unranked for 17 years, from 1970 to 1987.

The Oregon football I knew was the one that once lost to San Jose State, 5-0, and Fresno State, 10-4. Who loses 5-0 and 10-4?

Maybe the best sports quote I’ve ever heard came after that San Jose State game in 1975, when the new president at Oregon, William Boyd, told The Register-Guard, “I’d rather be whipped in a public square than watch a game like that.”

A year later, the Ducks opened with a narrow victory over Colorado State. “We broke their will!” an Oregon lineman chortled as he left the field.

The next week, USC broke Oregon’s will, 53-0.

One year in the early ’80s, a lightly-recruited wishbone quarterback who grew up in Eugene came back to town and led a poor Air Force team to a victory over the Ducks. In the locker room afterward, a Portland TV guy stuck a mike in Rich Brooks’ face and asked him, “Coach, does this mean your program has reached the bottom of the barrel?”

There was no money then, zero. In my first years around the program, about the time Vietnam War protests were still boiling, they simply did away with the marching band. They had a five-piece rock band in the stands.

When they reinstated the marching band a couple of years later, it came back in these ludicrous outfits that made them look like flamenco dancers. A lot of people wanted the rock band back.

You’ve heard the stories about how they used to have position meetings at the mouth of the tunnels leading into Autzen Stadium, with coaches scrawling chalk X’s and O’s on the concrete walls, latter-day cavemen and their hieroglyphics.

In 1975, they did away with food in the press box. Never mind getting it free, you couldn’t pay for it. There was none. So the guys from The Register-Guard began rotating responsibility for bringing lunch to the press box, and for the Civil War game with Oregon State, we had a potluck, complete with checkered tablecloth and a candle.

This was about the time the rest of the Pac-8 Conference was debating whether Oregon, Oregon State and Washington State could compete in the league, and the Los Angeles Times used the press-box-food stunt as a metaphor for the Northwest ills. The next year, food returned.

One time, back when writers used to buy seats on the team plane, we were chartering to Colorado. Except the plane the Ducks hired wasn’t big enough to take on sufficient fuel to leave from the Eugene airport and make it to Denver, so it went north to Portland to refuel before heading southeast. Think that would have happened at Texas?

It’s fitting that the week the Ducks pick off the last bauble on the table the first week of November — the top spot in the BCS, to align with the polls — the Huskies are coming to town. Nothing, nobody used to get under Oregon’s skin like Washington, with its stream of motor homes coming south and putting maybe 8,000 to 10,000 interlopers in Autzen Stadium’s unfilled seats.

The Huskies just had a way of one-upping Oregon back then, as in 1984, when they had three first downs and still won 17-10.

I can’t prove this, but in 1980, the story made the rounds that as Oregon defensive back Steve Brown returned an interception for a touchdown to wrap up a shocking 34-10 UO victory at Husky Stadium, an Oregon coach in the press box rapped wildly on the wall separating his booth from UW athletic director Mike Lude — bam-bam-bam-bam-bam — and yelled, “Take that, you bleeping Huskies!”

As years without bowls passed, and the financial crunch grew worse, there was actually a proposal floated to dome Autzen. Local lumber would be used, and no more would there be the revenue drain of fans staying home because of rain.

Instead, they built the Casanova Center for offices, meeting and locker rooms and training facilities. The football began getting better. Then Phil Knight happened, donating to the indoor practice facility, the stadium expansion, the new basketball arena, the academic center. Next is a new office/training/meeting complex, a monument solely to football. No doubt that will be frugally appointed.

A few years ago, Mike Bellotti went to the spread-option offense, and Chip Kelly has taken it to a brazen new level.

The college-football world is spellbound. They don’t know the half of it.

Bud Withers was a sports reporter and columnist at The Register-Guard in the 1970s and ’80s. E-mail: bwithers@seattletimes.com.